Now it makes sense

I just figured out via an email exchange who it was who probably pushed for that very disappointing reversal of job market support last year.

It wasn't who I thought it would be.

Not that it makes much difference. What's done is done. But by the sounds of the exchange this week, it appears that I may face similar opposition this year.

I must tread carefully, even though part of me wants to yell in frustration. Instead, I must be deferential and meek. I must do nothing to antagonize.

And here I was just starting to finally feel confident about the project. Now to know there's still doubt about it, even after all the work I've done since last fall, is disheartening.

My first response was "I'll show you". Which is probably a good response.

But that little voice in the back of my head whispers, "but what if you can't?"

I'm trying to ignore it.

Anybody got a pair of ear plugs?

How I feel this morning

Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy announcement

So, the title of the final installment of the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy will the The World's End.

Much speculation is ensuing in the blogsphere about which genre Pegg and Wright will tackle next. Having tackled the zombie movie parody in Shaun of the Dead...









...and then the buddy cop movie in Hot Fuzz




Many are wondering what's next. My first thought was science fiction. With a title like The World's End, that would fit. But parodying science fiction can be a tricky thing. Remember Galaxy Quest?

At least it's not gone that far yet

I had a dream last night that I was at a conference flipping through the program when I came a across a whole section of full page colour ads from job hopefuls, advertising their specialties and how attractive they would be as faculty. In the dream I wondered how much those ads would cost and who I might know who could help with the design.

At least the job market in academia hasn't got THAT competitive... yet.

Zotero saves the day!

I downloaded zotero today - a Firefox extension that promises to help me organize my notes in exactly the ways I've been wanting to.

I've been searching for the last few months for some way to make my new Mac more useful to my academic work. Specifically, I was looking for a way to take notes like I do in Endnote on my PC. I really love my Endnote, but I started checking out sente for the Mac after a friend recommended it.

But ideally, I wanted the flexibility to be able to transfer my files from PC to Mac and vice versa. I won't be able to dump the PC for a while, since I have to interface so much with PC-related programs for my e-learning job. But I wanted to use my Mac for more than just writing. It's been great to use for the writing, and I love the versatility of the machine, but I wanted notetaking capability too.

I'm almost skeptical because zotero is looking like it's absolutely everthing I want. I can create libraries, conduct searches and enter notes like I can with Endnote. Although it's a browser application, you don't need to be connected to the internet to use the files, so even when I'm cheaping out on the $15/night that hotels charge for access (what is that about anyways?!), I can still use the application.

As well - and here's where I'm breathless in anticipation of the possibilities - it can run on both my Mac and PC because it's a browser application. Not only that, but if I download the beta version, it promises to sync each computer's content with the other! Sync it every time I open one or the other! So that I'll always have a complete library of resources, regardless of which computer I'm working on. No worrying about whether I've updated all the files and transferred them from one computer to another. How cool would that be!? Of course I have yet to download the beta version, but I'm already super-duper impressed with the standard version.

And the best part? Transferring all my Endnote library to zotero is just a matter of a couple of clicks.

I can see this product making my research much easier in the future... the only thing cooler than discovering it now would've been discovering it a year ago!

Repetition avoidance

You would think that the part of my elearning job that requires me to review the website material before releasing it to the client would be easy. After all, it involves clicking through all the components and then listening to whatever audio and/or video components are on the site to make sure they say what they're supposed to say.

The only problem is that at the end of the project, listening to those audio and video components AGAIN is about the LAST thing I want to do! At the end of the project I've already:

• read through the materials provided by the client and/or discussed the project content with them
  
• scripted the content for audio/video appropriate format/language
  
• been at the video shoot/audio recording, including all the re-takes/re-records
  
• (in some cases) been in the editing suite while the editor completes final edits of multimedia content
  
• listened to/watched all audio or video to ensure it was recorded correctly before sending it to the web developer
  

So the final quality assurance of the video and audio component will be at minimum, the sixth time I've heard the same material.  

Sometimes, it's just really hard to listen to it just ONE more time...!

email's great... email sucks

Two emails this morning have got me realizing how good it is for some things and how horrible for others.

The first is a complaint about grades. I began to compose an answer explaining why they student's grade kept going down from first draft to second to final (hint: no change/improvement!) but then realized, I'm not about to defend my grading criteria via email, so erased all of it and told the student to make an appointment. If he shows up, I'll talk.

The second is a series of emails from the web developer for the online work I do, asking for "descriptions" of each of the sections of a course we've developed. I've said in at least three emails that the title of each section is pretty descriptive of what's within it. Since the developer has all the titles, I figure it would be easy to replicate that in the description. But I still keep getting emails asking for the description of each section.

Finally, I spent a half hour taking the document that lists all the titles, and adding a description line. Each line looks something like this:

[title] "describes [title]"

Seriously.

Somehow I suspect walking down the hall to the developer's cubicle to explain this would've taken much less time (not to mention my frustration) than having to write out an entire page of titles with the word "describes" in front of them!

Email's great for some stuff - I love it and regularly communicate by it, even sending off long missives... after all, I organized a whole conference long distance via email! But there are limits...

Metadissertating: Comprehensives and Dissertations

In my continuing fascination with this whole dissertation writing process, I've been thinking about the PhD process in general as well. Although the dissertation has taken a long time to draft, it's been a valuable experience, which made me realize how frustrating some of the other parts of the whole process have been.

I'm specifically thinking of the comprehensive exams process. The way that my department has it structured, we have one year after coursework to write the comps. Of course before you can write the comps, you have to read all the things on your list. The thing that gets me about my department is that it also requires you to create the list before you can begin to read it.

When I was doing the comps, they weren't too stringent about the one year rule. They've gotten much more militant about keeping people to the limit lately , and I have to say, I'm just glad that I did my comps when I did, or I would've been screwed. It took me a year and a half before I finished writing mine, and I feel like I busted my ass to get them done in time.

I honestly don't think I could've come up with the reading lists for three areas and read everything on those lists in a year. I don't mean that I wasn't willing to do so, or thought it was too much work. Obviously, I undertook the work needed to complete those lists and read them all. But I cannot imagine how I could've done it in a year. I just can't imagine it.

I have done this whole PhD the hard way though. I came into the program thinking I would study one primary area and one secondary area. After the first year, I was told that neither area was feasible (even though on the books, both would've been). So I really had to kind of start all over again to figure out what area(s) I wanted to specialize in. So even by the end of my coursework, I had no idea what I really wanted to do.

I think if I had known from the start and been able to stick with my plan, perhaps the comprehensives wouldn't have been such a huge pile of work. I know some of my colleagues have started thinking about them in the second year of coursework and started working on their lists. I suppose that's the thing that a person would have to do in order to take the comps in a year. That, or designate one of your areas based on your Master's thesis (which is another thing I didn't do - I was a little disillusioned with it at the time).

I understand the rationale behind having students create their own list is to become 'experts' in a field - actually three fields - but to have to discover what makes one an expert by having to create those lists in the first place seems a trifle unfair. I do find myself wondering whether an informal network of existing lists will crop up in an effort by student to stick within the one year limitation. I know I've shared my lists with people who have asked. I hope others do too.

But what has become even more apparent to me since then is how much more valuable the dissertation has been to creating expertise than the comps ever were. The comps were great because I've now read a whole bunch of stuff. But I don't feel they gave me an expertise in any of it. That came with the dissertation.

The dissertation (understandably) has forced me to become an expert in the topic. Which of course means I've read a lot of books. And I would say that 80% of those books were not in my comprehensives lists (and 95% of the important ones were not). So in essence, the dissertation reading was like it's own kind of comprehensive reading list.

But just as much as the dissertation had me reading things in a particular area, it also taught me HOW to write up all that work. There's a monumental difference between writing a series of seminar papers, and writing the dissertation. I would suspect that even for people who strung together seminar papers for their dissertation, that a considerable amount of effort went into making it all hang together. That's the tricky part - to see the whole in its entirety, not just the little snippets of scholarship that the seminar paper, article, or (even shorter) conference paper require.

What I suppose I'm saying is that if I was asked to design a PhD program, I would change the way the comprehensive exams and the dissertation were structured so that the comprehensives were less critical and the dissertation more so. Perhaps my experience is unusual and others have felt the comprehensives to be more - or as - useful as the dissertation. But for me, they're just a huge storehouse of work I've read. They help me understand other people's projects far more than they helped me understand my own. Until I'm part of that big academic party that tt-faculty represent, I don't know how much good that big storehouse actually is...

Post conference downer

There's something extremely exciting and satisfying about conferences that seems to evaporate when you return to everyday life.

A week of warm weather, stimulating conversation, fabulous seafood and lots of new ideas was replaced this morning with an early commute, teaching, a huge stack of marking, snow (!), and a seemingly endless list of unattended emails.

Welcome back to reality!

Happy blogversary!

Six years of blogging. That's actually quite a long time when you think about it. And yet, I'm still working on the degree that I was when I started, so maybe it's not so long... !

I really hope I finish it before the next blogversary!

There have been several times that I've thought about abandoning the blog over those years, but I keep coming back to it, even after extended absences. I haven't quite figured out why. I suspect a large part of it is because I know there are readers who follow even when they don't comment, and I guess I want to stay in touch with the people I know and care about. Sometimes it's just a great place to try out an idea. To those of you who have suffered through those - kudos to you!

I have found the occasional germ of a blog post emerging in my work either for conferences or for the dissertation. I also think that combined with the non-academic clients I write for in the elearning job, the blog has helped me better understand the different kinds of writing that different audiences require. Being more aware of audience has translated back to the dissertation as well, so that's a benefit of the blog.

But mostly it's my readers. Thanks for hanging in there through the droughts and the dullness to keep coming back for more. You're the primary reason why this blog exists, and I thank you!

Doing my work for me

Once I crawled out from the mountain of grading and online work this last week, I started fretting about the conference paper I'm to deliver next week.

The argument in the paper has to be supported by sufficient plot description so that the argument makes sense, but because part of the argument about Fido is that the visual effects of the film create the actual argument, it also requires a lot of scene description.

Anyone who has written a conference paper knows how hard it is to make an argument in twenty minutes. It's even harder when you have to spend some of that time describing the source on which the argument is based.

So in my frustration with trying to put this together, I distracted myself by reading through the conference program online.

The meet and greet for the area that is sponsoring my panel always shows a movie on the first night.

Guess which movie they're showing this year?

Awesome!

Turning back the clock

Yesterday, I helped my oldest daughter move back into our house.

I'll let you think about that one for a moment. I know I did when she first proposed it.

The rationale is that a temporary retreat to home will help her save some money for school. I can't argue with such a desire. After all, I'd like to see her return to school as well.

The part that I find myself wondering about is the changing family dynamics. When she moved out, they changed, so I imagine the same will happen moving back in. But I also wonder how she'll manage going from independence to a house full of people she's used to being in a more dependent relationship with.

It doesn't help that she's literally in a dependent situation because she's hobbling around on crutches after a sprained ankle on the weekend.

She's a smart cookie. We all are for that matter. So we'll readjust. But it will be a little odd for a while I'm sure.

I will be happy to see her more often though!